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Trever Fischer is a junior at The University of Akron with a strong enthusiasm towards coding, writing, photography, and above all: oranges. This is his site. Specifically, this is his "About" box. In addition to recently having finished his first year of college, he is also a full-time hacker who tinkers with Amarok, Plasma, various KDE bits, and PHP.

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#528
24
January
10

Exciting Adventures in Windows

Over the weekend, I went to a small LAN party of 4 people, including myself where we played a ‘quick’ 5-hour game of Sins of a Solar Empire. Yes, the game really is that huge. The real fun though, was that my windows partition ate itself a few days ago and I forgot about fixing it till I arrived. Windows would boot up and show me a BSOD saying it couldn’t mount the boot partition. Someone burned a XP Pro installer CD which I used to enter the ‘recovery console’. Then it got exciting. For about an hour, my friend who is a Windows expert tried to help me figure out which windows ‘drive’ contained my windows install. I was terrified of using the disk checker tool on the wrong drive for fear that Windows would eat it alive, claiming it was all ‘bad data’. My windows bootloader was installed to the first partition, sda1. In Windows, this shows up as the I drive because of the multi-format USB card reader my machine came with. My linux partitions (/boot and /) show up as either J or O, I’m not sure which is which.

The recovery console didn’t care about that useful bit of information I’ve lived with comfortably for about a year. My friend told me that Windows sees the first NTFS partition as the C drive, and thats that. Problem was, that windows couldn’t recognize any drives as being my NTFS partition. Linux could *guess* that sda1 had an NTFS header, but the important bits of the header were corrupt so it couldn’t be mounted. In the recovery console, I, J, and O were non-existant. The only drives I could see were two missing floppies, my two DVD drives, and my three hard disk partitions. After an hour of jumping through logical problems such as “If windows marks the drives it sees in alphabetic order, but my windows drive is actually called I in real life, and chkdisk might find a partition, then maybe I’m probably not screwed.”

I gave up1, rebooted to Linux in single user mode, and ran TestDisk. Problem solved.

Lesson learned here? You can’t use Windows to fix Windows. It just simply isn’t equipped to do so. I’ll gladly stick with software that gives me the tools to do what I want.

1: My friend actually donated a spare harddrive for the night that I quickly installed a fresh copy of windows to, letting us finally start our game at 2am. I fixed things when I got home later that day.

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